Judge Maurya Simon’s comments: “What a delightful and unlikely dramatic persona this poem creates: its speaker is a man’s trouser’s pockets, and they are steady witnesses to the familial and personal trials of the ‘man next door’ (an Everyman). The poem’s first line — ‘He’s losing faith in us’ — provides its dominant theme of loss, which the poet skillfully develops and enlarges as the poem proceeds. The man has alienated his wives, and lost his ‘daughters [who] abandon him / for intolerable lovers,’ while his sons ‘slur and darken,’ suggesting an emotional distancing between them, as well. The poem’s ending poignantly evokes an earlier time when the man’s children reached up with ‘soft fists... to tug out treasures’ from his pockets — and its final lines (‘his reward to let his pockets / haemorrhage for those he loved’) suggest his former pleasure in freely givinghis love to them, even as these lines hint back to and underscore his present desolation.”

Poem of the Year Judge Kelly Cherry’s comments: “Short as this poem is, it offers a heartbreaking glimpse of a life entire. A man living next door to the grown children of parents who were of his generation has become, with age, suspicious, insecure, secretive. His daughter has not kept in close touch with him, is living with a man of whom he disapproves. His wife and sons have, he thinks, turned against him—and perhaps they have, given his changed personality, or perhaps he misinterprets their responses. Brilliantly, the poem saves its revelation for the last stanza: this same man was once adored by his children, and he was glad to share with them what he had. The use of ‘hemorrhage’ in the last line is an extraordinary choice, emphasizing the free flow of the gifts he gave and simultaneously suggesting the ‘hemorrhaging’ of his own life. Other words that carry deliberate weight here include ‘talismanic,’ ‘slouches,’ ‘conjuror,’ and ‘intolerable.’ Let’s note also the fine lineation, which moves us swiftly from beginning to end. The speakers (‘we’) of the poem are psychologically astute and humane; the portrait is bittersweet, honest, and forgiving.”